Gilded Age Newport, The Architecture of Excess

In the spring of eighteen eighty-three, years before her family's Newport cottages were built, Alva Vanderbilt stood in her Fifth Avenue mansion in New York City and received about a thousand guests at a costume ball. The event cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in eighteen eighty-three money, an amount that would have supported dozens of working families for a decade. Alva wore a costume of a Venetian princess.

The footmen wore powdered wigs. Outside, the Atlantic churned against the rocks of Bellevue Avenue as if nothing had changed. Newport in the Gilded Age was the summer headquarters of American industrial wealth.

The fortunes made from railroads, steel, oil, and finance took physical form here along a two-mile stretch of cliffside. They called their houses cottages, which was the kind of irony only people with Newport cottages could afford. The Breakers, built for Cornelius Vanderbilt the Second in eighteen ninety-five, has seventy rooms and an open loggia through which the ocean wind moves regardless of whose name is on the deed.

The Marble House, which Alva's husband William Kissam Vanderbilt built her as a birthday gift in eighteen ninety-two, used five hundred thousand cubic feet of marble. The Elms, Rosecliff, Belcourt, one after another down the cliff walk, each trying to out-embellish the last. The architects Richard Morris Hunt and McKim, Mead and White designed many of these houses, drawing on French chateaux and Italian palazzos to produce something that existed nowhere in Europe: a display of American commercial wealth so new it had no inherited language of its own, so it borrowed everyone else's.

Most of these houses are now open to the public, administered by the Preservation Society of Newport County. The family wealth that built them is long dispersed. The marble remains, and the ocean, and the walk along the cliff above it, free to anyone who comes.